esxi

I was looking for away to easily add an entry to an ESXi host’s /etc/hosts file without using SSH to connect to the host. ESXi has a file management interface which can be accessed with standard GET/PUT operations. I put together a quick example of doing this with PowerShell using Invoke-WebRequest.

It has been a good while since I have worked with vSphere Management Assistant (vMA). I used it fairly often when I was managing a vSphere environment. Since I am teaching the vSphere Optimize and Scale class during the winter semester I spun up the vMA in the homelab to re-introduce myself to it.

Here are a couple of basic guides I put together for the VMware ITN classes at TCC. Back to basics for sure, but not everyone works with vSphere environments regularly, so this provides a guides for basic tasks – Uploading an ISO Image to a ESXi Datastore and Attaching an ISO Image on a local disk to a Virtual Machine.

In this post I am going to look at the two most common methods: using vMotion to migrate both the storage and running state of the vCenter virtual machine to a SimpliVity host, and using Storage vMotion to move storage and then removing and re-adding the vCenter virtual machine to inventory on a SimpliVity host.

With the efficiency SimpliVity’s Data Virtualization Platform (DVP) brings to data with deduplication, compression, and optimization SimpliVity customers often need to scale compute before they need to scale storage. As long as the SimpliVity environment is capable of providing the storage capacity and performance required the compute resources can be scaled using what we call compute nodes.

I just finished updating my home lab ESXi host to ESXi 6.0U1b. I was just poking around after doing the update and thought it might be useful to dig into the vSphere Installation Bundle or VIB. A VIB is an installation package which containing software, updates, patches, and drivers which can be installed on ESXi hosts.

The talk was on using PowerCLI to manage SSH. Specifically about using PowerCLI to report on the status of the SSH Service on ESXi host (is it running, what is the policy set for), updating the policy (Start and Stop with Host, Manual, Automatic), stopping and starting the SSH on ESXi hosts, and configuring the firewall for the SSH service to limit access to the service.